Current telecommunication networks operate at a nearly constant power independent of the traffic load. The temporal traffic demand can be substantially smaller than the overall network capacity. It is generally accepted that the significant discrepancy between traffic demand and network capacity is a consequence of significant variations in network traffic over time as well as capacity over-provisioning by network service providers.
Since the Internet backbone consists of a network of Points-of-Presences (PoPs) optimizing the energy consumption of each individual PoP may serve as a means of achieving network-wide power efficiency.
In modern IP networks, each PoP consists of multiple core and access routers that are co-located and which are inter-connected as follows. The access routers serve as the end-points of the regional networks and connect to the core routers. The core routers of a given PoP are typically connected together in a full mesh. In addition, the core routers of one PoP are connected to core routers of one or more distinct PoPs. Further, in current practice the connectivity between core routers of distinct PoPs typically employs link aggregation (or equivalently, link bundling) that combines multiple physical links into a single logical link.
The gap between the available network capacity and the temporal traffic demand presents opportunities for deactivating network components without significantly affecting network performance while reducing the network power consumption. Therefore, it would be desirable to have a system or method capable of determining which network components to deactivate or alternately activate in order to reduce the power consumption within a PoP without significantly affecting network performance.